Apogee Networks Announces Commercial Availability of Financial Analysis Solution for Managing Costs of Enterprise E-mail Applications At Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2002.

Business/High Tech Editors

Symposium/ITxpo 2002

New Implementation Options for Its Flagship Bandwidth Financial

Analysis Solution Greatly Reduce Cost and Install Times

ORLANDO, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 8, 2002

Apogee Networks(TM), the pioneer developer of financial analysis systems to manage the cost of delivering IT services, today announced the commercial availability of its e-mail offering.

The use, complexity and cost of providing enterprise-wide applications like e-mail are growing rapidly. Gartner predicts that the number of enterprise e-mail messages will increase at a CAGR of 40 percent per year through 2007. "Increasingly, IT is structuring itself as an internal service provider, complete with charge backs to the business units," says Maurene Caplan Grey, Gartner Research Director. "E-mail is often one of the first services IT will manage in this model; however most enterprises do not have a clear method to determine which users or cost centers are consuming the most e-mail related resources." With the Apogee Networks Email Solution, IT departments are now able to construct an equitable cost allocation methodology that accounts for the bandwidth required to transport e-mail messages between servers, the disk space needed to store the e-mails, the number of messages sent and the number of active accounts.

"E-mail usage is traditionally metered via the transaction recorded by the e-mail system," said Roger Boyce, CEO of Apogee Networks. "This identifies the business user accountable for the e-mail but it doesn't determine the cost of transporting the e-mail message across the network. We've solved the problem by integrating our NetCountant (R) financial analysis software platform and its network metering capabilities with leading e-mail systems. Apogee Networks' solution is the only enterprise-ready system that provides flexible usage-based financial modeling and charge back, making it easy to institute and maintain e-mail related network and storage consumption charges and billing policies across the enterprise."

Apogee Networks also introduced three new, lower cost configuration models for its enterprise bandwidth cost allocation solution. A recent Gartner Research Note (Practical Ways of Reducing Telecom Costs, February 7, 2002, J. Delcroix, author) identifies five actions that can be taken to reduce telecom costs: Negotiate Better Prices, Align Service Levels with Needs, Eliminate Wasteful Use, "Rightsize" the Infrastructure, and Restrain Bandwidth growth.

The Apogee Networks solution, which collects usage records from data sources, translates the data into a financial model of network traffic and generates usage-based data for budget allocation or organization/user chargeback, addresses the last four actions listed in the Gartner Research Note. The three models include:

-- Application Based Model -- The most economic and fastest to implement of the three, this option is best suited for data center implementation and enables users to determine the cost of bandwidth consumption associated with the main applications in use throughout the enterprise.

-- Location Based Model -- For companies requiring consumption data at the location or subnet level. Users can allocate costs of service by location ranging from national to regional to individual buildings or floors within buildings.

-- Organization Based Model -- The most comprehensive option for companies requiring consumption data at the organizational level, down to and including individual users. This model provides the most detailed cost and consumption information. IT Finance can use the data to properly set flat cost allocation rates or to directly charge organizations for specific consumption.

"In addition to giving customers implementation options and flexibility to best satisfy the requirements of their organizational and chargeback models," said Boyce, "we have significantly reduced the solution price, complexity and internal resource requirements, delivering a faster ROI and quicker time-to-value -- weeks instead of months!"

About Gartner Symposium/ITxpo

Gartner Symposium/ITxpo is the IT industry's largest and most strategic conference, providing business leaders with a look at the future of IT. For more than 10,000 IT professionals from the world's leading enterprises, Gartner's annual Symposium/ITxpo events are key components of their annual planning efforts. Attendees are responsible for more than $35 billion in IT spending for their respective companies, and rely on Gartner Symposium/ITxpo to gain insight into how their organizations can use technology to address business challenges and improve operational efficiency. For more information please visit www.gartner.com/symposium.

About Apogee Networks

Apogee Networks financial analysis systems can reduce the cost of delivering IT services such as network bandwidth, e-mail, Internet access, and data storage. By providing a financial model of network usage, costly legacy systems and applications are highlighted for more cost effective upgrades, wasteful consumption is eliminated and less than efficient network configurations are highlighted for redress. Additionally, budgeting methodology is improved by introducing varying degrees of usage-based charge back. Variations can range from merely using the data to establish consumption-based budgets to actual charge back on a periodic basis. For additional information, call 888/APOGEE3 (276-4333), 973/338-2300, e-mail: [e-mail], or visit us at: www.apogeenetworks.com.